What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.
~ Strother Martin playing the Captain in the movie Cool Hand Luke
This communicating of a man’s self to his friend works two contrary effects, for it redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in half.
~ Francis Bacon
It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.”
~ Yogi Berra
Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
~ Ambrose Bierce
Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.
~ Pearl S. Buck
They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
~ Carl W. Buechner
Two monologues do not make a dialogue.
~ Jeff Daly
One can say everything best over a meal.
~ George Eliot in Adam Bede
The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them. Even the choicest words lose their power when they are used to overpower. Attitudes are the real figures of speech.
~ Edwin H. Friedman
Many attempts to communicate are nullified by saying too much.
~ Robert Greenleaf
It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
English is the perfect language for preachers because it allows you to talk until you think of what to say.
~ Garrison Keillor.
I remind myself every morning: Nothing I say this day will teach me anything. So if I’m going to learn, I must do it by listening.
~ Larry King
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
~ Rudyard Kipling
Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Information is giving out; communication is getting through.
~ John C. Maxwell
No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.
~ Montaigne
“And people laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven’t you?”
~ Anne in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables
When you forget yourself and your fear, when you get beyond self-consciousness because your mind is thinking bout what you are trying to communicate, you become a better communicator.
~ Peggy Noonan, in Simply Speaking (NY: HarperCollins, 1998), page 8
One kind word can warm three winter months.
~ Japanese proverb
The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.
~ Rachel Naomi Remen
Brevity is the soul of wit.
~ William Shakespeare
He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.
~ William Shakespeare in Love’s Labour’s Lost
The silence often of pure innocence
Persuades when speaking fails.
~ William Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale
Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.
~ Character in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion
The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.
~ George Bernard Shaw
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
~ Mark Twain
If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.
~ Woodrow Wilson
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in picture of silver.
~ Bible, Proverbs 25:11
How lovely on the mountains Are the feet of him who brings good news, Who announces peace And brings good news of happiness, Who announces salvation, And says to Zion, “Your God reigns!”
~ Bible, Isaiah 52:7
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Let us dare to read, think, speak and write.
~ John Adams, 2nd President of the United States
As addictions go, reading is among the cleanest, easiest to feed, happiest.
~ Joseph Addison
Some books are undeservedly forgotten, none are undeservedly remembered.
~ W. H. Auden
Reading maketh a full man.
~ Francis Bacon
Some books are to be tasted, other to be swallowed, and a few to be chewed and digested.
~ Francis Bacon
He who loveth a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, or an effectual comforter.
~ Isaac Barrow
When I am dead, I hope it may be said: “His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
~ Hilaire Belloc
I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities that author has to offer; and that for a host of reasons the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word.
~ Sven Birkerts, in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
The information I most want is in books not yet written by people not yet born.
~ Ashleigh Brilliant
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
~ Joseph Brodsky
Reader, If it be not strong upon thy heart to practise what thou readest, to what end dost thou read? To increase thy own condemnation? If thy light and knowledge be not turned into practice, the more knowing man thou art, the more miserable man thou wilt be in the day of recompense; thy light and knowledge will more torment thee than all the devils in hell. Thy knowledge will be that rod that will eternally lash thee, and that scorpion that will for ever bite thee, and that worm that will everlastingly gnaw thee; therefore read, and labour to know, that thou mayest do, or else thou art undone for ever. When Demosthenes was asked, what was the first part of an orator, what the second, what the third? he answered, Action; the same may I say. If any should ask me, what is the first, the second, the third part of a Christian? I must answer, Action; as that man that reads that he may know, and that labours to know that he may do, will have two heavens — a heaven of joy, peace and comfort on earth, and a heaven of glory and happiness after death.
~ Thomas Brooks, in Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices, Thomas Brooks, Banner of Truth, 1652 p. 22
Books we must have though we lack bread.
~ Alice Brotherton
A good book is never exhausted. It oges on whispering to you from the wall.
~ Anatole Broyard
Laws die; books never.
~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
~ Anthony Burgess
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
~ Edmund Burke
All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.
~ Richard De Bury, in Philobiblion
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
~ Samuel Butler
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
~ Italo Calvino
Reading for experience is the only reading that justifies excitement. Reading for facts is necessary bu the less said about it in public the better. Reading for distraction is like taking medicine. We do it, but it is nothing to be proud of. But reading for experience is transforming.
~ Henry Seidel Canby
All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
~ Thomas Carlyle
In books lies the soul of the whole past time; the articulate, audible voice of the past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
~ Thomas Carlyle
He gave himself up so wholly to the reading of romances that a-nights he would pore on until it was day, and a-days he would read on until it was night; and thus he sleeping little and reading much the moisture of his brain was exhausted to that degree that at last he lost the use of his reason.
~ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, in Don Quixote
God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.
~ William E. Channing
A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
~ Chinese proverb
The strongest memory is weaker than the palest ink.
~ Chines proverb
“What shall I do with my books?” was the question; and the answer “Read them” sobered the questioner.
But if you cannot read them, at any rate handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the very first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. . . . Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquanintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.
~ Winston Churchill
Anyone who has a book collection and a garden wants for nothing.
~ Cicero
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
~ Cicero
The only way to do all the things you’d like to do is to read.
~ Tom Clancy
A book in the hand is worth two on the shelf.
~ Henry T. Coutts
One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper patterns at the right moment.
~ Hart Crane
Literature is man’s exploration of man by artificial light, which is better than natural light because we can direct it where we want.
~ David Daiches
The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.
~ Rene Descartes
There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.
~ Charles Dickens
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
of Prancing Poetry.
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll–
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul.
~ Emily Dickinson
The world is a library of strange and wonderful books, and sometimes we just need to go prowling through the stacks.
~ Michael Dirda
I seldom read on beaches or in gardens. You can’t read by two lights at once, the light of day and the light of the book. You should read by electric light, the room in shadow, and only the page lit up.
~ Marguerite Duras
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends. they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, the most patient teachers.
~ Charles Eliot
A collector recently bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare; but for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Experience”
There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, in The American Scholar
When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes. My luggage is my library. My home is where my books are.
~ Desiderius Erasmus
There are those who, while reading a book, recall, compare, conjure up emotions from other, previous readings. This is one of the most delicate forms of adultery.
~ Ezequiel Martínez Estrada
When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than was there before.
~ Clifton Fadiman
If the crowns of all the kingdoms of the Empire were laid at my feet in exchange for my books and my love of reading, I would spurn them all.
~ Francois Fenelon
But he who truly loves books loves all books alike, and not only this, but it grieves him that all other men do not share with him this noble passion. Verily, this is the most unselfish of loves!
~ Eugene Field in Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
~ Gustave Flaubert
And indeed, what is better than to sit by one’s fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is buring?
~ Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary
Read in order to Live.
~ Gustave Flaubert
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folk have lent me.
~ Anatole France
There are no bad books any more than there are ugly women.
~ Anatole France
The book must of necessity be put into a bookcase. And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, must be catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil!
~ William Gladstone
I have always suspected that authors lie about the books they read, their purported influences, much as men lie about their sex lives; they are at once ashamed and vain, reluctant to be judged, hiding behind a safe parapet like Joyce and Proust and Kafka.
~ Brian Glanville
The dear good people don’t know how long it takes to learn to read. I’ve been at it eighty years, and can’t say yet that I’ve reached the goal.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
~ Ursula Le Guin
The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it ives you moral knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is moral illumination.
~ Elizabeth Hardwick
What is a book? Part matter and part spirit; par thing and part thought–however you look at it, if defies definition.
~ Ernest O. Hauser
All good books have one thing in common. They are truer than if they had really happened.
~ Ernest Hemingway
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice . . . and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.
~ Gilbert Highet
It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
~ S.I. Hiyakawa
Poets are never allowed to be mediocre by the gods, by men or by publishers.
~ Horace as quoted by Montaigne
Reading is a sage way to bump up against life. Reading may be an escape, but it is not escape from my own life and problems. It is escape from the narrow boundaries of being only me.
~ Gladys Hunt, in Honey for a Woman’s Heart (HT: Heidi)
Every man who knows how to read has it in him power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant, and interesting.
~ Aldous Huxley
Farther than arrows, higher than wings fly poet’s song and prophet’s words.
~ Inscription on the Brooklyn Public Library
Books are the most enduring monument of man’s achievement. Through them, civilization becomes cumulative.
~ Inscription in the Detroit Public Library
A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life.
~ Inscription in the New York Public Library.
Here genius lies enshrined.
Here sleep in silent majesty
The monarchs of the mind
~ Inscription in the St. Louis Public Library
People who don’t read are brutes.
~ Eugene Ionesco
Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
~ Thomas Jefferson
I cannot live without books.
~ Thomas Jefferson
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
~ Joseph Joubert
A reader finds little in a book save what he puts here. But in a great book he finds space to put many things.
~ Joseph Joubert
A book ought to be an icepick to break up the frozen sea within us.
~ Franz Kafka
A book is a gift you can open again and again.
~ Garrison Keillor
As a former English major, I am a sitting duck for Gift Books, and in the past few years I’ve gotten Dickens, Thackeray, Smollet, Richardson, Emerson, Keats, Boswell and the Brontes, all of them Great, none of them ever read by me, all of them now on a shelf, looking at me and making me feel guilty.
~Garrison Keillor
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
~ Helen Keller
If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries.
~ John F. Kennedy
The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called “the permanent things”–the norms of human action.
~ Russell Kirk, in Enemies of the Permanent Things. LaSalle, IL: Sherwood Sugden and Co., 1984. page 41
A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog’s ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.
~ Charles Lamb
In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from the binding.
~ Charles Lamb
Magazines all too frequently lead to books, and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature.
~ Fran Lebowitz
Any kid who has parents who are interested in him and has a houseful of books isn’t poor.
~ Sam Levenson
You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
~ C. S. Lewis
A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.
~ G. C. Lichtenberg
Books, nowadays, are printed by people who do not understand them, sold by people who do not understand them, read and reviewed by people who do not understand them, and even written by people who do not understand them.
~ G. C. Lichtenberg
The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.
~ Abraham Lincoln
Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.
~ John Locke
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks
All the sweet serenity of books.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Books are more than books. They are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
~ Amy Lowell
The world exists to be put in a book.
~ Stephane Mallarme
I am a machine condemned to devour books.
~ Karl Marx, in a letter to Engels, April 11, 1868
Readers, on the other hand, have at least 7.5 books going all the time. Actually, the number of books a reader takes on is usually directly related to the number of bathrooms he has in his home and office. I am working on a survey that will show that, over a lifetime, readers are in bathrooms seven years and three months longer than nonreaders.
~ Calvin Miller, “Confessions of a Librophliac” in Christianity Today, January 18, 1985, page 32.
A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.
~ John Milton
As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.
~ John Milton
What enriches language is its being handled and exploited by beautiful minds–not so much by making innovations as by expanding it through more vigorous and varied applications, by extending it and deploying it. It is not words that they contribute: what they do is enrich their words, deepen their meanings and tie down their usage; they teach it unaccustomed rhythms, prudently though and with ingenuity.
~ Michel de Montaigne, “On Some Lines of Virgil”
There is hardly any grief that an hour’s reading will not dissipate.
~ Montesquieu
A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear that it will go off in you face. . . . It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.
~ Edward P. Morgan
Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing.
~ Christopher Morley, in The Haunted Bookshop
Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.
~ Kathleen Norris
Read properly, fewer books than a hundred would suffice for a liberal education. Read superficially, the British Museum Library might still leave the student a barbarian.
~ A. R. Orage)
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
~ P.J. O’Rourke
Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.
~ George Orwell
A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.
~ Katherine Patterson
I divide all readers into two classes: Those who read to remember and those who read to forget.
~ William Lyon Phelps
In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.
~ Anna Quindlen, in How Reading Changed My Life
Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. they are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
~ Anna Quindlen, in How Reading Changed My Life
Tough choices face the biblioholic at every step of the way–like choosing between reading and eating, between buying new clothes and buying books, between a reasonable lifestyle and one of penurious but masochistic happiness lived out in the wallow of excess.
~ Tom Raabe, Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction
Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.
~ Hazel Rochman
People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory.
~ Franklin Roosevelt
The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.
~ Andrew Ross
The universe is made of stories,
not of atoms.
~ Muriel Rukeyser, “The Speed of Darkness”
If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.
~ John Ruskin, in Sesame and Lilies
You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable–nay, letter by letter… you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly “illiterate,” undeducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, — that is to say, with real accuracy– you are for evermore in some measure an educated person.
~ John Ruskin
The Bible is the one book to which any thoughtful man may go with any honest question of life or destiny and find the answer of God by honest searching.
~ John Ruskin
There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
~ Bertrand Russell
All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write.
~ Carl Sandburg
The peace of great books be for you,
Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages,
Bleach of the light of years held in leather.
~ Carl Sandburg, from his poem “For You”, in Harvest Poems: 1910-1960
The difference between the effect produced on the mind by thinking for yourself and that produced by reading is incredibly great…For reading forcibly imposes on the mind thoughts that are as foreign to its mood as the signet is to the wax upon which it impresses its seal. The mind is totally subjected to an external compulsion to think this or that for which it has no inclination and is not in the mood…The result is that much reading robs the mind of all elasticity, as the continual pressure of a weight does a spring, and that the surest way of never having any thoughts of your own is to pick up a book every time you have a free moment.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
Desultory reading is delightful, but to be beneficial, our reading must be carefully directed.
~ Seneca
It does not matter how many, but how good, books you have.
~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Learning to read . . . we slowly learn to read ourselves. Once we learn how to read, even if then we do not live more wisely, we can at least begin to be aware of why we have not.
~ Mark Shorer
No furniture is so charming as books.
~ Sydney Smith
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
~ Richard Steele
And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.
~ Robert Lewis Stevenson, in An Apology For Idlers
As if a man’s soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed an narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train.
~ Robert Lewis Stevenson, in An Apology For Idlers
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
~ Robert Lewis Stevenson, in An Apology For Idlers
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.
~ William Styron
My home is where my books are.
~ Ellen Thompson
Books are the treasured wealth of the world, to fit the inheritance of generations.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Books must be read as deliberately and as reservedly as they were written.
~ Henry David Thoreau
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!
~ Henry David Thoreau, in Reading
I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read towards the right and I recommend this method.
~ James Thurber
Book love, my friends, is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.
~ Anthony Trollope
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world, “lighthouses” (as a poet said) “erected in the sea of time.” They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
~ Barbara Tuchman.
If you’re going to be a prisoner of your own mind, the least you can do is make sure it’s well furnished.
~ Peter Ustinov
You tell me your favorite novelists and I’ll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all.
~ Stephen Vizinczey
The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from out neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
~ Voltaire
Books rule the world, or at least those nations which have a written language; the others do not matter.
~ Voltaire
A novelist has mad a fictional representation of life. I doing so, he has revealed to us more significance, it may be, than he could find in life itself.
~ Bernard de Voto
I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat.
~ Simone Weil
Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.
~ E.P. Whipple
As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading–the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the resspondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.
~ E. B. White
Comerado, this is no book,
Who touches this, touches a man,
(Is it night? Are we here alone?)
It is I you hold, and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms–decease calls me forth.
~ Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass”
Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of the viol or lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
~ Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray
A ravening appetite in him demanded that he read everything that had ever been written about human experience. He read no more from pleasure–the thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever. He pictured himself as tearing the entrails from a book as from a fowl.
~ Thomas Wolfe, in Of Time and the River
We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.
~ Virginia Woolf from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Two: 1920-1924
Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.
~ Virginia Woolf in her essay “Street Haunting”
Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.
~ Virginia Woolf
Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books.
~ Marguerite Yourcenar
Always be aware that there is a brief magical moment in every relationship when the right statement will change a life forever.
~ Ed Anderson and John E. Peterson, in Loving Words Every Child Needs To Hear (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998).
By words the mind is excited and the spirit elated.
~ Aristophanes
A man’s command of the language is most important. Next to kissing, it’s the most exciting form of communication mankind has evolved.
~ Oren Arnold
Men believe that a society is disintegrating when it can no longer be pictured in familiar terms. Unhappy is a people that has run out of words to describe what is going on.
~ Thurman Arnold
A word after a word after a word is power.
~ Margaret Atwood
I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.
~ Jane Austen
“Plain English”–everybody loves it, demands it–from the other fellow.
~ Jacques Barzun
Words are as vital to life as food and drink and sex, but on the whole we don’t show as much interest in language as we do in the other–more obvious–pleasures.
~ Gyles Brandreth
Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.
~Gerald Brenan
Standard English is a convenient abstraction, like the average man.
~ G. L. Brook
Words are like planets, each with its own gravitational pull.
~ Kenneth Burke
Be not a slave of words.
~ Thomas Carlyle
The manner of your speaking is full as important as the matter, as more people have ears to be tickled than understanding to judge.
~ Lord Chesterfield
Words have power. We must set out to harness that power with a clear awareness that words can both tear down and build up. They are much like a sharp knife that in the hands of a surgeon can heal, but in the hands of a careless child can kill. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” (Proverbs 18:21)
~ Larry Crabb, in Encouragement: The Key To Caring
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
~ Thomas Jefferson
Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of demons.
~ Aldous Huxley
We see words that blow like leaves in the winds of autumn–golden words, bronze words, words that catch the light like opals. We learn that words have an independent life of their own, grown out of echoes and connotations and associations. We see that words are tactile; we find rough words, smooth words, words with splintered edges, words to shout or whisper with, words that caress, words that strike.
~ James J. Kilpatrick
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
~ Rudyard Kipling.
True eloquence consists of saying all that should be, not all that could be, said.
~ La Rochefoucauld
True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.
~ Alexander Pope
The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.
~ Chinese Proverb
One kind word can warm three winter months.
~ Japanese Proverb
One should not aim at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.
~ Quintillian
Time had no special significance for a certain juvenile and incorrigible fisher of words who thought nothing of fishing for two weeks to catch a stanza, or even a line, that he would not throw back into a squirming sea of language where there was every word but the one he wanted. There were strange and iridescent and impossible words that would seize the bait and swallow the hook and all but drag the excited angler in after them, but lie that famous catch of Hiawatha’s, they were generally not the fish he wanted. he wanted fish that were smooth and shining and subtle, and very much alive, and not too strange, and presently, after long patience and many rejections, they began to bite.
~ Edwin Arlington Robinson
Words are a heavy thing…they weigh you down. If birds talked, they couldn’t fly.
~ Sy Rosen and Christian Williams, in Northern Exposure, On Your Own
If . . . you are willing to think about how we communicate, and consider the words and the forms of grammar, then you are automatically a member of the Authority, entitled to a ring and a secret handshake and the thrill of membership. A word of warning: If you get hooked on the study of the language, you are in that sorority, or fraternity, for life.
~ William Safire
Every utterance is an event, and no two events are precisely alike. The extreme view, therefore, is that no word ever means the same thing twice.
~ Louis B. Saloman
Most people have to talk so they won’t hear.
~ May Sarton
For we let our young men and women go out unarmed in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them to read, we have left them a the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.
~ Dorothy Sayers, in The Lost Tools of Learning
Syllables govern the world.
~ John Selden
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
~ William Shakespeare
Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech; that your native tongue is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.
~ George Bernard Shaw
The game of life is the game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later, with astounding accuracy.
~ Florence Shinn
Words too are known by the company they keep.
~ Joseph Shipley
When it comes to learning good English, most people are prone to be supine.
~ John Simon
It is with words as with sunbeams. The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
~ Robert Southey
Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.
~ Adlai Stevenson
Language was given to conceal men’s thoughts.
~ Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
A word to the wise is sufficient.
~ Terence
One always refers to language as a tool; but after playing around with more years that there legitimately are, i tell you that it is also, in a vulgar phrase, something else. More precious than pearls at any price, it is a marvelous toy, a plaything of the mind.
~ Joe D. Thomas
English is a language of marvelous qualities. I like to see it properly used just a one likes to see a shirt properly washed and a dinner table properly set.
~ Barbara Tuchman
A new word is like a wild animal you have caught. You must learn its ways and break it before you can use it.
~ H. G. Wells
If you could write a best-selling book, what would you write about?
If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
~ Kingsley Amis
I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.
~Charles Baudelaire
When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
“His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
~ Hilaire Belloc
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
~ Robert Benchley
Nice writing isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to have smooth and pretty language. You have to surprise the reader frequently, you can’t just be nice all the time. Provoke the reader. Astonish the reader. Writing that has no surprises is as bland as oatmeal. Surprise the reader with the unexpected verb or adjective. Use one startling adjective per page.
~ Anne Bernays
About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
~ Josh Billings
It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.
~ Gerald Brenan
Medicine is my lawful wife. Literature is my mistress.
~ Anton Chekhov
Literary people are forever judging the quality of the mind by the turn of expression.
~ Frank Moore Colby
Writers are too self-centered to be lonely.
~ Richard Condon
The secret of good writing is to say an old thin in new way or to say a new thing an old way.
~ Richard Harding Davis
Nothing is new except arrangement.
~ Will Durant
It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.
~ Havelock Ellis
If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write.
~ Epictetus
The desire to write grows with writing.
~ Erasmus
Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
~ Gene Fowler
Writing is a struggle against silence.
~ Carlos Fuentes
In order to write about life, first you must live it!
~ Ernest Hemingway
Originality is undetected plagiarism.
~ William Inge
You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.
~ Tracy Kidder
I’ve experienced t he pain and joy of hte birth of babies and the birth of books and there’s nothing like it: when a child who has been conceived in love is born to a man and woman, the joy of that birth sings throughout the universe. The joy of writing or composing or painting is much the same, and the insemination comes not from the artist himself but from his relationshiip with those he loves, with the whole world.
~ Madeleine L’Engle, in A Circle of Quiet
Though old the thought and oft exprest,
‘Tis his at last who says it best.
~ James Russell Lowell
Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical.
~ W. Somerset Maugham
Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism.
~ George Moore
Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.
~ John Morley
Empty your knapsack of all adjectives, adverbs and clauses that slo your stride and weaken your pace. Travel light. Remember the most memorable sentences in the English language are also the shortest: “The King is dead” and “Jesus wept.”
~ Bill Moyers
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
~ George Orwell
There is nothing like literature: I lose a cow, I write about her death, and my writing pays me enough to buy another cow.
~ Jules Renard
Words are loaded pistols.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Originality is not saying something new, originality is taking the mundane and remaking it afresh.
~ Kevin Stilley
A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.
~ Logan Pearsall Smith
There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
~ Red Smith
Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
~ William Styron
Word has somehow got around that the split infinitive is always wrong. That is a piece with the outworn notion that it is always wrong to strike a lady.
~ James Thurber
Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.
~ Lionel Trilling
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
~ Mark Twain
Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before him.
~ Mark Twain
As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.
~ Mark Twain
Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.
~ Voltaire
Be obscure clearly.
~ E. B. White
I write to understand as much as to be understood.
~ Elie Wiesel
It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.
~ Virginia Woolf
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I love my college students, but it is laborious to read some of their papers – long rambling incomplete sentences (if you can call them sentences), weird paragraphing, non-existent organization of the material into an argument, and multi-syllable words used in ways that only a contortionist could appreciate. The best writing advice I can give to them is that was shared by Mark Twain in a letter to a young friend, “I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words, and brief sentences. That is the way to write English. It is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it.”
Does that advice seem overly simplistic? Well, consider the following reconstructed adages borrowed from The Power Of Simplicity: A Management Guide to Cutting Through the Nonsense and Doing Things Right
- Pulchritude possesses profundity of a merely cutaneous nature. (Beauty is only skin deep.)
- It is not efficacious to indoctrinate a superannuated canine with innovative maneuvers. (You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.)
- Visible vapors that issue from carbonaceous materials are a harbinger of imminent conflagration. (Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.)
- A revolving mass of lithic conglomerates does not accumulate a congery of small green bryophitic plants. (A rolling stone gathers no moss.)
I appreciate my students trying to impress me with their vocabulary. And, there is room for more picturesque language in writing. However, simple is usually better.
Trout goes on to offer the following advice,
- Keep sentences short.
- Pick the simple word over the complex word.
- Choose the familiar word.
- Avoid unnecessary words.
- Put action in your verbs.
- Write like you talk.
- Use terms your readers can picture.
- Tie in with your reader’s experience.
- Make full use of variety.
- Write to express, no impress.
What suggestions would you add to his list?
A few days ago, Hugh Hewitt conducted a three hour on-air interview with spy novelist Daniel Silva. You can find the transcript of the interview HERE, and the podcast of the interview HERE.
However, there is one portion of it that will be of particular interest to those of you who write fiction. It addresses the writing process and the manner in which Silva relates to his characters. Check out this excerpt:
HH: I’ve got to make the music come up a little bit louder. But you were saying you try not to let the real news get in the way of your writing.
DS: Right.
HH: And I think that’s a very interesting insight into the struggle.
DS: Yes.
HH: Explain that to people.
DS: I wall off my part of the day where I’m involved in my world. And then I come out of that shell briefly, and I live in the real world. And then that’s really, it’s a wonderful thing to inhabit two places. But I really, I roll out of bed, like most writers, I think, I do a lot of writing in my sleep. Graham Greene, I learned a lot of lessons from him. And one of the things he did is always read what he wrote that day right before he went to bed. And then, you know, I just find that when I roll out of bed, I just grab a cup of coffee, and go down and start writing, because that’s always the most productive time, that first hour that you’re awake.
HH: And is that, do you set for yourself a discipline that every single day, or at least Monday through Friday, that’s what you do?
DS: Monk-like, and it is not Monday through Friday. I work seven days a week. I find it very, very difficult to take days off. It’s rather like an actor staying in character on a set, you know. If you come out, it’s just harder to get back in. I find taking even a single day, when I come back and start writing again, that it takes me a little longer to get back into it, so I try to write every day.
HH: Do you know where you’re going to end at the beginning of every novel?
DS: I haven’t the foggiest. Haven’t the foggiest. I know maybe about a third of it, and I don’t want to know anymore than that. I want to bring the characters and the story to life on the page, and then let the characters lead me by the hand to the finish line. And I’ve been working with Gabriel long enough to know that at a certain point, you’ve just got to put the story in his hands, and get out of the way.
HH: Now do you hear the conversation? Or do you write it first and then hear it?
DS: You know, I was, I was, it’s funny you should ask. That’s a great question. I sometimes feel, particularly when Gabriel is with his mentor, Ari Shamron, that I’m just a mere stenographer, and that these characters have so come to life in my head, they’re so part of our family, that you’re just really kind of writing down what they say. It’s not, when you really work on a novel, and you really get that magic, when you get into that clear air, it’s not that you’re making up a story, it’s just that you’re writing down a story that you already know, or you’re remembering a story. I know that sounds kind of weird, but it’s, that’s the point where I like to get to, where you’re just, it’s like the memory of the story is so imprinted in your subconscious that you’re just writing down something that you already know.
HH: You know, there are a couple of recurring places in your books – Shamron’s villa, the waiting room in the airport where Mossad people go to when they return.
DS: Right.
HH: And when you, do you see that when you’re writing? That’s a sort of extension of the question I said about do you hear it. Do you see them in those rooms? Do you have a vision?
DS: You bet. You bet. I mean, one of the things that I’m a stickler for, and is a term that we use called point of view, and that every scene has a point of view through the eyes of a character. And sometimes, I’ll go God’s eye and write in a more omniscient point of view. But I generally, in the formula of my novels, we’re really with Gabriel 75-80% of the time. And so I see things through his eyes. And because he’s an artist, he has a very unique vision, and I try to capture that vision. And so he’s very observant about certain kinds of things, and I try to use that to my advantage when I’m writing.
* * *
What do you think? Do you write the book, or do you write the characters and then the characters write the book?
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Do you need a particular environment to be able to write. Personally, I have the same simple need for both reading and writing. I need a quiet space free from distractions (i.e., no people).
The Guardian has posted pictures of the Writing Rooms of some authors. The picture above is that of Eric Hobsbawm. Go on over to The Guardian to check out the rest. You will need to click on the authors’ names to reveal the picture of their writing rooms.
I write a lot. And when I say that I write a lot, I mean that I write A LOT! I spend about half of my time at work each day writing on some project or another. I write a significant amount for the college classes I teach as an adjunct. I do contract writing. I have been working on a couple of books. And, I write about 5 – 10 blog posts each day for a variety of themed blogs. However, when it comes to writing a lot, I am not even living in the same as Isaac Asimov. Consider this excerpt from Casanova Was A Book Lover
Isaac Asimov, another writeaholic, typed ninety words a minute, wrote twelve hours a day, rarely went on vacation, and said he never experience writer’s block. He wrote more than four hundred books and, counting his articles and stories, produced more than twenty million printed words. For him everything could be a story. He once wrote a novel about the annual meeting of the American Booksellers Association. Television interviewer Barbara Walters asked Asimov what he’d do if he had only six months to live. His answer, “I’d type faster.”
Now I don’t feel so bad about being up at 3:00 in the morning writing this blog post when I have to be back at work in about four hours.
Click on image
Over the last few weeks I have had several conversations with people about becoming a writer. Well, not so much about becoming a writer as thinking of oneself as a writer. Many of you are writers, so I ask you, “When did you begin to think of yourself as a writer? When did writer become part of your self-description?”
For me the transition to thinking of myself as a writer took place in by early teen years. Read more
